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By Root 2186 0

of history books, Whitney demonstrated to President John Adams and President-elect Thomas Jefferson how a tableful of random parts could be assembled into a complete gun. In fact, behind the scenes Whitney was having all kinds of problems getting the system to work. The guns were delivered more than eight years late, long after the crisis that had prompted their manufacture had abated. Moreover, a twentieth-century analysis of the surviving guns showed that they weren’t actually made by the Whitney system, but instead incorporated parts that had been hand-crafted in the factory. The famous demonstration for the presidents was done with bogus parts. Whitney, it turns out, spent most of the eight years not working on the musket order at all, but using the money from the contract to further his efforts to gain compensation for the cotton gin.

III

Compared with anything that had gone before, cotton was a wonderfully light and cool material, yet it did almost nothing to stifle the impulse to dress ridiculously, particularly where women were concerned. As the nineteenth century progressed, women became increasingly embedded in attire. By the 1840s, a woman might carry beneath her dress a knee-length chemise, a camisole, up to half a dozen petticoats, a corset, and drawers. The idea, as one historian has noted, was “to eliminate, as far as possible, any impression of shape.” All of this sartorial infrastructure could be dauntingly weighty. A woman could easily go about her daily business under forty pounds of clothing. How she managed to deal with urinary needs is a question that seems to have escaped historical inquiry. Crinolines, or hoopskirts, stiffened with whalebone or steel, were introduced as a way of giving shape without requiring so much underclothing, but while the load was fractionally lightened the scope for clumsiness was greatly increased. As Liza Picard put it in Victorian London: “One wonders how, or whether, Victorian ladies managed to traverse a properly equipped drawing room in a full crinoline without sweeping several small tables clear.” Getting into a carriage required consideration and cunning, as one fascinated correspondent indicated in a letter home: “Miss Clara turned round and round like a peacock, undecided which way to make the attempt. At last she chose a bold sideways dash, and entered with a squeeze of the petticoat, which suddenly expanded to its original size, but when her sisters had followed her there was no room for the Major” (or indeed anyone else).

Crinolines also lifted slightly when the wearer bent—when leaning to strike a croquet ball, for instance—offering an electrifying glimpse of frilly leggings to any man wise enough to say, “After you.” When strained, crinolines had a dismaying tendency to invert and fly upward, like a stressed umbrella. Stories abounded of women left trapped and staggering inside misbehaving hoops. Lady Eleanor Stanley recorded in her diary how the Duchess of Manchester tripped going over a stile—though why she decided to attempt to negotiate a stile in a hoopskirt is a separate imponderable—and ended up exposing her tartan knickerbockers “to the view of all the world in general and the Duc de Malakoff in particular.” High winds were a special source of disorder, and stairs a positive danger. The greatest risk of all, however, was fire. “Many wearers of crinolines were burnt to death by inadvertently approaching a fire,” C. Willett and Phillis Cunnington note in their unexpectedly solemn History of Underclothes. One manufacturer advertised proudly, if unnervingly, that its crinolines “do not cause accidents, do not appear at inquests.”

The golden age of crinolines was 1857–1866, by which point they were largely being abandoned, not because they were dangerous and preposterous, but because they were increasingly being worn by the lower orders, destroying their exclusivity. “Your lady’s maid must now have her crinoline,” tutted one magazine, “and it has even become essential to factory girls.” The danger of crinolines among the grinding cogs and whirring belts